Business: Defiant Saigon

More than five years after the fall of Saigon brought South Viet Nam
under the banner of socialism, private enterprise survives there.
Indeed, the free-market system that Hanoi vowed to crush accounts for
60% of the South's economic activity. Out of necessity, the regime has
tacitly accepted the fondness that the entrepreneurial Saigonese have
for profitsand even the still treasured U.S. dollar. Following a
visit to what is now officially called Ho Chi Minh City, TIME
Correspondent David DeVoss filed this report:

Early one morning in March 1978, residents of Saigon were jolted awake
by something eerily reminiscent of the...